Posted
by
msmash
on Tuesday March 21, 2017 @01:20PM
from the how-about-that dept.

Microsoft just took a direct swipe at Salesforce with a new enterprise-ready version of LinkedIn's customer relationship management product called Sales Navigator. From a report on CNBC: "Today's announcements take Sales Navigator to the next level," Doug Camplejohn, LinkedIn sales solutions head of product, said in a blog. The new product steps up competition with arch rival Salesforce. Microsoft beat out Salesforce to acquire Linkedin for $26.2 billion -- by far the company's largest acquisition to date -- in June. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was so concerned, he accused the company of "anti-competitive behavior" and urged regulators to investigate. Flash-forward less than a year and Microsoft's new Sales Navigator Enterprise Edition incorporates many features aimed at turning LinkedIn into a must-have tool for sales teams at big companies.

Oh boo-hoo Salesforce, MS has had a CRM for decades, just not a particularly good one. Now it has a somewhat better one, all of a sudden you can't compete in an open market with what you've got? Build a better one then.

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

You clearly have been outsourcing the wrong jobs in your organization sir.

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

And while you're at it, can anyone build a CRM that doesn't require signing off souls to all three Hells to make it work? I've only got one and Satan, Cthulhu and Kali all require exclusive rights to it.

To reflect your own callousness, oh boo-hoo to management who think they can try to do things on the cheap and still have a quality solution at the end. And yes, sometimes spending millions of dollars can still be on the cheap for large projects. There are plenty of competent CRM professionals and consultants who can set up any of the major CRM platforms for you which will work very well for any company with reasonable expectations.

All of the major players have deficiencies, but none of those cannot be fixe

By your logic, the only database systems in the world should be Oracle and MSSQL.

Just because all the "big" players are currently absurdly over-complicated and expensive doesn't mean there isn't or shouldn't be a desire for something more reasonable.

Hell I'm sure there's already more than one open source CRM out there. Just a question of one of them getting enough features and enough public awareness to become "big" in the same kind of context that Postgres or MySQL are well-known and well-used alternative

By your logic, the only database systems in the world should be Oracle and MSSQL. Just because all the "big" players are currently absurdly over-complicated and expensive doesn't mean there isn't or shouldn't be a desire for something more reasonable. Hell I'm sure there's already more than one open source CRM out there. Just a question of one of them getting enough features and enough public awareness to become "big" in the same kind of context that Postgres or MySQL are well-known and well-used alternatives to Oracle and MSSQL. Sure they still require some knowledge but its not like you have to hire a $300/hr consultant to get a Postgres database running well enough for small to mid-sized projects.

When a CRM implementation is unsuccessful, it is almost certainly not because they didn't pay enough in software licensing. It is more likely because they didn't put enough human resources into implementing them successfully. And the cost to hire quality staff to implement proprietary vs open source solutions is not significantly different. There are cheap MSSQL consultants and cheap Postgres consultants, but quality resources for either are just as expensive.

The trouble is when those "implementation costs" are $20k for the base platform, another $10-15k in addons/extensions/plugins/whatever and then $100-300/hr for consultants to set it all up and suddenly you're looking at 6-12 months and $100k in cost to get it going.

That's out of the price range of many small to mid sized businesses. You have to be pushing the higher end of "mid sized" before that becomes a plausible cost.

To compare with Postgres: Yes, if you need a massive database to handle multiple tera

I don't know. They are certainly building a very nice tower in downtown SF, right near where I work. At the very least, 2 decades from now people will know of the Salesforce Tower, just as they know of the Transamerica Pyramid, and yet not know what either of those companies do.

Salesforce helps maintain a consistent sales process. It has a reporting system that lets you analyze your pipeline and bookings. The reporting system is good for tracking current sales performance of individuals, product lines, and companies. It's good for evaluating the likelihood of meeting bookings targets in the current month, quarter, or year. In a business, it's important to track bookings because they are a leading indicator for future revenue and, to a lesser extent, costs. You can also use salesforce to help create sales forecasts and targets for future years.

I'm interested in what SalesForce was going to use LinkedIn for, if not precisely this - they are basically whining about someone else doing what they intended to do, while trying to push it as some sort of abuse of monopoly (where exactly is the monopoly here?)

SalesForce is not whining. This writer of the article appears to have written a press release for Microsoft talking about how this innovation has Salesforce shaking in their boots. The author could not even be bothered to ask anyone at Salesforce what they thought of this new development.

Perhaps you did not notice, but this article was not produced by Salesforce and does not contain ANY information from anyone at SalesForce.

It is merely the opinion of the author of the article that SalesForce is concerned by this development. The only evidence they provide for that theory is that a Salesforce representative accused MS of anti-competitive behavior during the negotiations to buy LinkedIn (possibly as an effort to get regulators to pressure MS out of buying LinkedIn).
I do not actually see

I'm signed up with LinkedIn. Every so often is spams me that someone else I know is also on LinkedIn, or asks me to spam other people I know to join LinkedIn.

Other than that, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with it. I never have used it as any resource. I think it simply convinced a few people to sign up with them, and infected the internet from there.

You can somewhat think of it as a weak form of references. A prospective employer is likely to try searching you out on LI to see who you know and what they do (and of course you can store resume-like information such as job history and whatnot on LI if you want as well.)

As long as you're not looking for a new job or considering doing such though, its mostly just a spam generation system.

Having LinkedIn behind your CRM is like having a Rolodex of people who might be interested in buying something from you if you call them, except that all those people *want* to be on your Rolodex and actively make sure their contact information is up to date.

CRMs lie in that dark triangle between Sales, IT, enterprise software, and Bullshit Business Buzzword Bingo (Yes that's a triangle with 4 sides) - It's going to awful no matter what. It's going to be painfully expensive and it always has to work. It's woven in to your business logic. The vendor knows this. They have you by the balls. They spared no expense wooing your bosses with only the finest coke to be snorted off the most expensive hookers getting there in the first place.

Notice they didn't give actual subscriber numbers. A 20% increase would be significant if they went from 1 million to 1.2 million customers but if they went from 10 to 12 it's not as impressive. Seeing as how Microsoft seems to fumble everything (internet, Zune, Windows phone, Xbox [at least initially]) that isn't their core business (Windows and Office) I don't think Salesforce should be too scared yet.

Have you used recent versions of Windows or Office? You could have stopped at "everything" and been just as right. I say this as a primarily Windows shop that keeps a few Macs handy and runs infrastructure primarily on Linux.

it's a complete WYSIWYG application platform that can build complex business apps without code ("Clicks not Code" in SF parlance). It's basically Visual Basic 6 for the web.

OTOH I see a lot of shops using VF/Apex to build apps for no good reason (especially in the post Lightening era). But still, properly used Salesforce makes it child's play to build, deploy and update fairly complex business apps. I can't help but wonder if Microsoft & LinkedIn are willing to put the money behind building that sor

Microsoft builds a new, frequently unnecessary language every 3 or 4 years anyway.. I doubt they'd have a problem with that. How well they'd do, especially in the first few iterations, is up for grabs though of course.

We're currently looking into a number of CRM type platforms (we haven't landed on a single one yet, though both Salesforce and Dynamics are in the mix) to try an consolidate and replace a number of legacy systems, mostly from a cost, consistency, and interoperability standpoint. Our business isn't sales. However two points; One as you mention with a bit of creativity it can be applied to anything really to a less or greater degree depending on what you are doing, and Two is that it doesn't mean you cannot d

Wait... Why is it such a news flash that a company is making moves to make their products more valuable to their existing customers, and to expand market share? -- That is, in fact, what they should be expected to do, right??

Wait... Why is it such a news flash that a company is making moves to make their products more valuable to their existing customers, and to expand market share? -- That is, in fact, what they should be expected to do, right??

Yes, but this is Microsoft. For the last decade or so their idea of "make their products more valuable to their existing customers" is getting rid of features, hiding controls and interface selections from users and making the software more difficult to manage on the back end.

Let's not talk about how they expand market share.

If MS is creating a competitive product and expanding market share, good for them! That is big news for them. As you so correctly noted, this is just what is expected from every oth

If MS is creating a competitive product and expanding market share, good for them! That is big news for them. As you so correctly noted, this is just what is expected from every other company on Earth, but so novel and exciting to see Microsoft trying to do it.

This really could be a stroke of genius on the part of MS. A CRM tool is only as good as the information that goes into it. If everybody on the team is not disciplined in putting good information into the tool, then garbage-in-garbage-out. The genius that I see here is this is a CRM that leverages a platform where the customer wants to put into it as much work-related information about themselves as they can. My LinkedIn network isn't that big and I see a constant stream of things where people are patting themselves on the back for some new job, certification, or other such thing. From a sales perspective, each of those events represents a potential opportunity to engage, or a lead. It would be the equivalent of each time a mention something cool I did at work it was via an email to every salesperson with whom I had come into contact.

If executed properly, this could be a rather significant development in the CRM space. This is especially valuable because as a salesperson, everything depends on timing and the LinkedIn activity feed is nothing but a stream of potential cues: "I see that John just took a new position at his company. Now is a good time to connect back up with him and see if there is anything I can offer to help him in his new role." That is not the sort of insight you typically get form a CRM system.

Zune: failed to compete with ipod.Microsoft Phone: failed to compete with either android or iPhone.microsoft store: failed to compete with apple store and was rolled into best buy as a kioskmicrosoft surface: failed to compete with iPad or android.Bing: failed to compete with either google or yahoo despite being based on code bought from yahoo.Azure: failed to compete with aws/ec3/rackspace.
so yeah. i dont think salesforce is as terrified as they would have been say, 30 years ago when a microsoft em

I'd be hesitant to call Azure a failure....it's above Google in market share and isn't that far behind Amazon:https://www.skyhighnetworks.co... [skyhighnetworks.com]

I'm not sure that Surface was ever geared to be a direct competitor with iOS or Android given it's price point. Surface RT maybe a failure, given that MS pulled the plug on it, but in general it's been a success:http://pocketnow.com/2016/02/0... [pocketnow.com]

microsoft store: failed to compete with apple store and was rolled into best buy as a kiosk

Right next to the Apple kiosk in the Best Buy down the street from the mall with the Microsoft Store in it, which happens to be across from the Apple Store. In case you missed it, my point is that they both have both.

microsoft surface: failed to compete with iPad or android.

Mostly because it's not trying to; it runs a full desktop OS and is intended to replace desktop/laptop functionality on the low- to mid-end, with some useful tablet functionality mixed in. I don't use a Surface, myself, but I did just invest in a similar platform from Dell for my company; seems

Microsoft purchased LinkedIn so it could take all it's contact information and sell them to their customers and they beat Salesforce to the punch doing it. Look at me playing the world's tiniest violin.

This was about as blatant a press release as I've ever seen. I guess slashdot has to whore itself out somehow to pay the bills. Aren't sponsored links supposed to be a different color so we know to avoid them?